Sorry, I couldn't afford your webinar.
> Chernobyl was a potential kiloton-level steam explosion
No, the building doesn't appear to have been structurally sound enough to have enabled a larger pressure explosion than it suffered.
> They also exposed 600,000 people (the "liquidators") to direct contact with life-limits of radiation in the clean up.
Well, closer to 250k were actually sent to the site. But do you think they all died? Or got cancer? Because they're being examined by international scientists working on the effects of radiation on people. If thousands of them died or went missing they'd know.
> I also love the nukers going hand in hand with the oppressive soviet-era government in covering up the immense toll of Chernobyl, because it suits their argument.
Let's say that you were right, that there were 600k (not 250k), and that they all died (as opposed to ~70), that's still only 60 weeks of normal pollution deaths. Even if you were right, it's not as big a number as you think it is. And that's in one of the more primitive countries that has nuclear, when it was going through it's financial and political death throws.
> In Fukushima's case, it was the fact they had decades worth of spent fuel rods that if they weren't able to keep them cool (which was a possibility in the first weeks after the disaster) would have ignited
No, it's that they had these spent fuel rods in the reactor building. It seemed easier because they didn't have to be moved as far, but proved to be a really bad idea once the reactor building was irradiated.
But it was never near the china-syndrome levels you describe. There was a plan to basically poke a hole in the wall with a really long crane, and then just fill the pools through the hole in the wall. They did equivalently dangerous work at the time and nobody get more than trivial exposure.
> This practice of storing spent fuel rods onsite is also very common in the US, and it is a huge problem waiting to happen.
Not so much. The Fukushima problem was storing them in the reactor building. If they were stored next to the plant, but not in it, there wouldn't have been a problem at all. Most plants store spent fuel outside the plant. (Often there's short-term storage next to the reactor waiting ~1y for much of the the fission byproducts to decay, then the fuel is moved to the nearby pool.)
> Great excerpt from suppressed Japanese report on Fukushima:
You know, most suppressed reports are really just wrong, and were not released because of that. Sadly, because conspiracy theories are fun.
The report was from 2011, when they were in the midst of it, and knew comparatively nothing. They now know that even the minimal evacuation zone wasn't needed and people even a few km away would have been safer staying at home.
> Gee, evacuate Tokyo.
No, that's ridiculous. That's at the level of an engineered disaster, where you take all the fuel and light it on fire and then let it continue to burn. That's not a realistic failure mode. Yes, a plant could catch fire (Chernobyl) but by the nature of a large containment rupturing explosion, you've usually got a place to pour fire retardant in. And we now know that meltdowns tend to create an elephant's foot type of barely-warm slurry by their nature. As they melt into the concrete and steel they naturally dilute and eventually don't have the heat to continue melting through the containment. Fuel geometries mean that an explosion would likely not remove even a large minority of the fuel from the reactor building, and fuel ejected from a reactor is unlikely to burn - whereas fuel in a critical configuration in a reactor, would. Such as in Windscale in the UK.
In so many ways, Fukushima was never close to a worse disaster. Further, many existing (by the time of the accident) safety designs would have already protected the plant. Spent fuel should have been outside, and the generators should have been nearby on the hill as opposed to barely above sea level in the basement. The electrical room (incoming power to run the backup pumps) should have been above ground, allowing the generators to be bypassed if they failed (or were flooded, like this time).